Meet Rav Chadash

Yes I am the Aleph student who travelled furthest to be here.  I live in Cape Town, South Africa, and joining this kahal, online or in person, has been so special, beautiful, deeply enriching .

 

 I also, originally, come from Budapest, Hungary. 

Why is this important to start with? I come from a place where being openly Jewish was not safe, not welcome, and where a couple decades ago only on Purim could I imagine that as a woman I could be a yeshiva bocher or a rabbi. 

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So how did I get from there to this ordination ceremony now?

It was my late grandfather who taught me how to read and write in Hebrew during the summer holidays I spent with my grandparents in the countryside.

My grandfather, during WWII, 

along with other Jewish men from his town, was taken to Russia as a human shield to the Hungarian army. He miraculously survived and as he was a linguist, on his way back home through the Russian villages he learnt Russian. 

He also spoke German, he said it was Goete’s language as well. I also remember him reading The Forward in Yiddish.

He became a professor of linguistics after the war. But he wouldn't talk about religion. 

From time to time, he used to take Russian tourists around his small town and stop at the minaret built when the Turkish empire ruled this area. 

“This is where they would do their call to prayer”, he would say, 

and then recited the Sh’ma. 

Then he watched the Russian tourists’ reactions. Those who knew what he was saying would come and talk to him afterwards, and in this way he would find those who were secretly Jews just like him. They forged long-term relationships, exchanging letters and updates and Yiddish literature…but religion was off the table. 

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He wrote a beautiful farewell letter to me before he died, 

while I was in Jerusalem, immersing myself in Jewish texts for the first time, at Pardes. My Mom and Aunt found his tallit in the linen cabinet, neatly folded, untouched for decades. Just like our religious practices and spirituality were, which I had just found and started to unfold.  

 

Over ten years later, pregnant with my third child, in Cape Town, a song kept coming to me. You see, I often sing to myself and then listen to why that song came, and find the wisdom in it. It is a line from our liturgy in the Torah service, originally from Eicha, Lamentations: 

 

Hashiveinu Adonai eilecha,venashuvah - turn us, turn us towards You G-d and we will return  - a beautiful idea that we are in partnership with the Divine, in the process of returning, making teshuvah.  What caught my attention though, was the next line:

Chadesh yameinu k’kedem “Renew our days as of old”. 

 

“Renew” (that) made sense, after all I was expecting a baby, a new life. It should renew our family relationships, and all that a new life would bring to the world.

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But why k’kedem “as of old”?  

 

Then I realised: 

While I was carrying and birthing a new baby, a new family member, a new person into the world, my very act of carrying a baby and bringing it into the world was an ancient one. An ancient act of renewal. 

But there is more: a chiddush, - a NEW insight into this verse. 

Chadesh, “renew”, also means “repair”. And with that, our verse now says to renew and repair our days. 

 

And there is a lot to repair and a lot to heal in our world today and in the past. My Grandfather’s world, our world. And doing that, will renew and repair the future.

 

May our ordination and each new cohort of rabbis Be a Renewal, a Repair.  May each new student we teach may each new prayer and blessing pronounced bring us closer to renewed sanctity and healing: within ourselves, our ancestors and in the entire world. 

 

My Hebrew name is Channah Devorah Shulamit. The first letters of my names  spell Chadash. As I become a brand new rabbi, I hope to be renewed and to renew, a bridge from the past to the future. 

 

הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ יְהֹוָ֤ה ׀ אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ (ונשוב) [וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה] חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם׃

Take us back, Eternal One, to Yourself,

And let us come back;

Renew our days as of old!